Quotes by Theologians

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
C.S. Lewis
During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and services. All he could manage to say was, "My little children, love one another." He repeated this over and over.
Gilles Quispel
It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning. They shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.
Søren Kierkegaard
After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'.
Ian Ker
Awake, my soul! Why should I give hours and days any longer to the vain world, when there is such a world of misery at my very door? Lord, put thine own strength in me; confirm every good resolution; forgive my past long life of uselessness and folly.
Andrew Bonar
If it be good to come under the love of God once, surely it is good to keep ourselves there. And yet how reluctant we are!
Andrew Bonar
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.
G.K. Chesterton
Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.
John Henry Newman
The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.
John Calvin
Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
John Calvin
To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.
David Bentley Hart
You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.
Thomas Traherne
The freedom to share one's insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienabl e right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt
I have no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table. Given the subtleties of sin and the persistence of evil, we would soon be living in moral anarchy and political chaos if there were no provision for justice.
Eugene H. Peterson
When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.
Abraham Kuyper
The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.
C.S. Lewis
I break out laughing. I frown.I yell and scream. Sometimes,if one jokes and giggles,one causes war.So I hide how tickled I am.Tears well up in my eyes.My body is a large city.Much grieving in one sector.I live in another part.Lakewater.Something on fire over here.I am sour when you are sour,sweet when you are sweet.You are my face and my back.Only through you can I knowthis back-scratching pleasure.Now people the likes of you and Icome clapping, inventing dances,climbing into this high meadow.I am a spoiled parrot who eats only candy.I have no interest in bitter food.Some have been given harsh knowledge. Not I.Some are lame and jerking along.I am smooth and glidingly quick.Their road is full of washed-out placesand long inclines. Mine isroyally level, effortless.The huge Jerusalem mosque stands inside me,and women full of light.Laughter leaps out.It is the nature of the rose to laugh.It cannot help but laugh.
Jalaluddin Rumi
When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.
Søren Kierkegaard
Something wonderful has happened to me. I was carried up into the seventh heaven. There all the gods sat assembled. By special grace I was granted the favor of a wish. "Will you," said Mercury, "have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing." For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: "Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side." Not one of the gods said a word, on the contrary, they all began to laugh. Hence, I concluded that my request was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with great taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to answer gravely: "It is granted thee".
Søren Kierkegaard
Zeal is very blind or badly regulated when it encroaches upon the rights of others.
Pasquier Quesnel
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards they simply unveil them to the eyes of men ... crisis shows us what we have become.
Bishop Westcott
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G.K. Chesterton
If there were no tribulation there would be no rest if there were no winter there would be no summer.
Saint John Chrysostom
Yet if he would man cannot live all to this world. If not religious he will be superstitious. If he worship not the true God he will have his idols.
Theodore Parker
What worries you masters you.
Haddon W. Robinson
Worry is the cross which we make for ourselves by overanxiety.
Francois de Fenelon
When Adam dolve and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?
John Ball
One principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling and divide and shift their attention among a multitude of objects and pursuits.
Nathaniel Emmons
If a man is called to be a streetsweep-er he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King
Work is a substitute "religious" experience for many workaholics.
Mary Daly
He who shuns the millstone shuns the meal.
Erasmus
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame and money but even practises it without any hope of doing it well.
G.K. Chesterton
The joy about our work is spoiled when we perform it not because of what we produce but because of the pleasure with which it can provide us or the pain against which it can protect us.
Paul Tillich
Fear not that thy life shall come to an end but rather that it shall never have a beginning.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination?
Jeremy Collier
Action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
William Temple
Our Lord commonly giveth Riches to such gross asses to whom he affordeth nothing else that is good.
Martin Luther
The rich man is not one who is in possession of much but one who gives much.
Saint John Chrysostom
War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity it destroys religion it destroys states it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.
Martin Luther
What distinguishes war is not that man is slain but that he is slain spoiled crushed by the cruelty the injustice the treachery the murderous hand of man.
William Ellery Channing
A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom to be relieved of fear and frustration.
Nels F. S. Ferre
How few our real wants and how vast our imaginary ones!
Johann Kaspar Lavater
Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history which cuts without wounding and enobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
Martin Luther King
Many without punishment none without sin.
John Ray
Peace if possible but truth at any rate.
Martin Luther
He who when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth tells it boldly and has done is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
Paul Tillich
One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.
G.K. Chesterton
That great artillery of God Almighty.
William Temple
Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force.
Albert Schweitzer
The time is always right to do what is right.
Martin Luther King
Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward.
Søren Kierkegaard
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid.
G.K. Chesterton
I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
Of all modern notions the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home they say is dead decorum and routine outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
G.K. Chesterton
By-and-by never comes.
Saint Augustine